Sixty years ago in Winnipeg, Canada, the wind was howling, the snow was blowing, and Randy Bachman was dreaming.
He imagined writing songs, playing the guitar and touching the world with his music.
“That was my teenage dream and who would have thought that I would be standing here tonight in front of you, playing my music 60 years later,” Bachman told an appreciative audience Saturday in The Sharon.
Bachman is 79 but on stage he proved he’s still – you should pardon the expression – “taking care of business.”
Bachman was filled with life stories and music memories in this monologue/concert. He talked about growing up in Winnipeg. “It was so cold we didn’t have hippies in the 60s,” he said.
What Winnipeg did have was another teen singer named Burton Cummings who joined Bachman in The Guess Who, one of the seminal bands of the ‘60s generation.
Bachman showed how hard that band could rock with a blistering take on “Shakin’ All Over,” the group’s first big hit.
Listening to Bachman and the guys rip into that number, still sends “shivers down my backbone” and some “shakes in my thigh bone.”
“There’s this thing about music; when you hear these songs, it brings back so many memories,” Bachman said, while sitting on a stool, center stage, with his guitar. That was his position for most of the show.
He wore a light blue denim shirt, open at the collar, and jeans. Bachman was surrounded by his band including his son Tal, who played guitar and keyboards. Tal performed his ‘90s hit, “She’s So High.”
Above the band, a screen showed still photos from Bachman’s family and musical history through nearly seven decades.
Bachman and Burton Cummings kept gold records coming during the 60s. “I was born to be mild,” Bachman said, “Burton was born to be wild.”
They combined for a string of hits, including “Laughing,” the follow up to their No. 1 breakout ballad, “These Eyes.”
“Burton gave that song one of the great vocals of all-time,” Bachman said.
“After ‘These Eyes’ the record company wanted a ballad, but we wanted to rock,” he added. “Roy Orbison had a hit with a song called ‘Crying.’ So we came up with ‘Laughing.’”
The song, Bachman said, came to him while listening to an early Bee Gees’ single called “New York Mining Disaster 1941.”
“I heard that opening guitar lick and I just started fooling around, and that became ‘Laughing,’” he said. “It’s interesting how songs are made. I get ideas from everyday life and I write them down.”
The big rock breakthrough for The Guess Who came with “No Sugar.” The concert picked up momentum and Bachman and his band turned in a scorching rendition of the song.
“No Time Left For You,” was another smash for the band. Bachman really picked up the emotional pace with “American Woman,” one of those songs irrevocably stamped in the mind of anyone who lived through the ‘60s. The beat, the lyrics, the anti-war message remains powerful.
During this period, Bachman wrote a jazz/rock classic, “Undun.” It showed his musical versatility and how he defied musical categorization.
Bachman left The Guess Who around 1970 and drifted for a few years before finding another musical home with Bachman Turner Overdrive, aka BTO.
His idea for an early hit came from a close call while driving. It was called “Roll On Down the Highway.” Then came “Let It Ride,” “Hey You,” and the stuttering, “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet.”
BTO was simple, straight ahead, foot stomping power rock. But Bachman can never resist switching styles. He did that with a jazzy BTO number “Lookin’ Out For Number One.”
“Randy Bachman is an amazing talent,” said Jeff Wilson, who attended the concert with his wife, Julie. They are from Hamburg, N.Y., not too far from the Canadian border.
“Canadian rock and roll has always been great but not everybody hears it,” Jeff Wilson said. “Where I’m from, we heard Canadian music all the time. I loved the Guess Who and BTO.”
Julie Wilson shares that appreciation.
“We had to come and see Randy Bachman,” she said. “It was a last minute thing, but here we are.”
The Wilsons agreed that “Taking Care of Business,” is an all-time classic.
Near the end of the nearly two-hour concert, Bachman was ready to deliver BTO’s biggest hit.
He explained that he had been kicking the song around for years, until he finally came up with the chorus, “Taking Care of Business.”
“I was driving in Canada and I heard a disc jockey say, ‘we’re taking care of business.’ The light went off in my head and I wrote it down immediately.”
Bachman rose from the stool and his band started the familiar pounding beat to the song’s intro. Virtually everyone at The Sharon was standing, singing and clapping to the number.
It felt like 1974 all over again, but you can’t define Randy Bachman’s music by a calendar.
The song, like the singer, is timeless.
Tony Violanti covers arts and music for Villages-News.com. He was inducted into the Buffalo NY Music Hall of Fame as a music journalist.
